During cold weather months, school children typically wear a jacket or coat to school. Such children also commonly utilize canvas backpacks for carrying books and school supplies to and from school. In many cases, a child wearing a coat or jacket will have difficulty extending his or her left and right arms beneath the left and right shoulder straps of a backpack, and the child will have further difficulty correctly situating the backpack upon his or her back. Upon arriving at school, such child will commonly have further difficulty removing the backpack from his or her back. Thereafter, upon removing both the backpack and the coat or jacket, the child typically will either separately hang the coat and the backpack upon hooks in a cloak room, or upon a coat rack. On occasion, such child may hang the coat upon a coat hook and alternately separately store the backpack within the child's desk storage bin. As a result of such separate storage locations of coats and backpacks, the coats and backpacks often become separated. As a further result of such separation, the child, upon returning home from school, often will have forgotten his or her backpack, bringing home only the coat which is worn. In circumstances where the child remembers to retrieve his or her backpack at the end of a school day, the child typically must repeat the above described awkward and cumbersome process of extending arms beneath backpack shoulder straps and appropriately situating the backpack upon his or her back.
During transitional seasons between summer and fall and between winter and spring, school children commonly depart home for school wearing only shirt sleeves and carrying a backpack, such as described above, upon their backs. During such seasons, such children commonly will carry a coat or jacket within the main storage compartment of the backpack, as a precaution against unexpected weather changes. Such practice undesirably takes up needed space within the backpack, and such practice often presents or creates undesirable and uncomfortable lumps upon the side of the backpack which comes into contact with the wearer's back.
The instant inventive jacket and backpack assembly solves or ameliorates the problems set forth above by modifying the structures of both a common jacket and a common backpack so that those two articles may be worn as a unitary assembly, and so that the backpack may alternately store the jacket while utilizing the jacket as a backpack back cushioning element.